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Journal Key:

Green = Steve | George = navy | Janet = Purple | Evelyn = Black

10/12/06 (Thursday)

So, Cara has tried to bite PJ, and PJ has tried to pull Cara's face off. I've solved all of our problems: I'm going to make Cara wear a face mask. Then she can become a hockey goalkeeper.

Anyway, Cara had a nice day at Susan's. She made a picture, it's black construction paper with light green rectangles glued to it to form the letters E, X, I, and T. I'm a loyal mother, so I've hung it beside our front door. If you're ever at our house, you'll know the way out. Susan said that Cara did a good job; she told her to find the glue, and Cara put the pieces on by herself. Casey was at daycare, too, and Cara cried whenever Casey did. I'm sure Susan appreciated that.

Poor Casey! We went over to their house, and I got to hold Casey. I was showing her a nice little duck toy that clearly belonged to her, and Cara took it. I asked nicely and she gave it back, and then PJ took it! However, she has the advantage that neither of them had, of having toddlers to watch and try to emulate.

We went over and saw Julianna, too. Cara showed her how she can touch her toes, so we all stood there in the driveway, touching our toes.

Susan told us that Cara didn't eat much today, and I figured she'd make it up at dinner. She did not. She ate a little bit, and then she started throwing food onto the floor. We took her out. I tried feeding her again a little later, with the same results. If she were hungry, she'd eat!

We had our usual evening, with one exception. When she came out of the bath, I held Cara up to the mirror and asked her whether she saw Cara. "Wave to Cara," I told her. She did. It was cute. She also showed herself her feet.

Cara is in bed now, but I don't feel confident about her sleeping through the night. I'd say there's a good chance she'll wake up hungry!

10/13/06 (Friday)

Out for our walk this morning, Cara is very interested in the sky. At one point a flight of geese, an efficient vee, flies overhead and she watches until they're out of sight. I point out a helicopter, small birds. She follows all with interest and points out other birds as they go by. We stop for minutes near the base of a large tree on Lloyd Street where a squirrel is working high in the branches, knocking acorns to the ground. The squirrel is very industrious.

But the best moment comes when I point out the moon, a white half-moon distinct against the blue sky. Cara looks and looks. So this is what those books are about. Later, as we near home, she again looks with great intensity.

We go for a quick trip to Johnson Park where Cara feeds the goats, observes all the familiar animals but is most interested in the other little boys and girls who show up on the chilly morning.

Later, after Cara's nap, I give her toast with jam (this time I'm the adventurous one) and she carefully dips her goldfish into the jam, leaving the underlying bread untouched.

10/14/06 (Saturday)

I think Cara is trying to duplicate the eensy-weensy spider gesture; she placed the tips of her index fingers together, rather than finger to thumb, and twisted her hands. But her real triumph for this visit is that she has conquered our dining room chairs - she can climb up and seat herself, as she demonstrated more than once, and she would like to take her meals there, like everyone else, although we continued to use the high chair most of the time.

We had our usual Friday visit. The weather was quintessentially gorgeous fall weather - crisp but sunny - so we had a joyful romp through the park. This time both the Schmutz and Great-grandma Emily accompanied us. Cara was eager to swing on the swings. At the playground we were joined by a pair of sisters ages 3 and 9 who turned out to be great playmates; the 9-year-old especially was solicitous of Cara and looked after her like a little baby-sitter while we grown-ups stood around and talked.

Cara always likes to run and play in the sand; this time she did a lot of drawing with a stick. I mounded sand up and stuck my stick upright; she stuck hers in as well.

Her appetite seems to have rebounded from Thursday. She ate up most of a carton of yogurt before we went out, and was famished, desperate for food, by 6 o'clock, when she consumed an entire yam and almost two hot dogs (after she spurned my chicken) as well as a little bread, a few blackberries and a couple of pieces of carrot.

We all had fun with the Learning Zoo (or whatever its real name is) after dinner, and then, seeing our baby seemed tired, George popped in the Animals of the World DVD. Cara sat in my lap with her head resting on my shoulder through the whole thing. I snoozed a little myself.

At bathtime her energy rallied. This time she learned that, when you try to put rubber duckies into a basket in the water, they float right again! Boy, those rubber duckies - you have to chase them all around the tub! Somehow, in the midst of all the action, she once again got washed from top to toe. When she was ready to get out, she tried a new trick - our tub has a small ledge about halfway up the inside; Cara placed both feet on that ledge and stood on it while clinging to the rim like a little mountain climber.

Once again she firmly rejected the bedtime bottle, even though Grandpapa had taken the step of purchasing whole milk just for her. (Her loving Grandpapa also lovingly carried a CD player into the bathroom so she could have music with her bath, but it didn't seem to make much impression, maybe because we had the volume too low, or the bath itself is too absorbing, or the music itself wasn't to her taste. I'm willing to try this experiment again.)

Even without the bottle, bedtime went fairly smoothly this time. Here's what we did. After she was thoroughly toweled and dressed in her sleeper, and her hair had been brushed, we sat and read the big book of stories, games and rhymes (a current favorite) from cover to cover. Then I carried her to the zoo and we got two animals who needed to sleep with her. Standing beside the pack'n play I showed that Curious George was already sleeping inside, and she leaned in. I laid her down and left - she cried briefly, probably less than 2 minutes, and not very hard, and she slept the whole night through.

I would not miss her first waking moments for anything. I had just poured my own coffee, but when she stirred I went right down to hold my warm, snuggly, sleepy little girl, and see how she stretches herself awake while I dress her. Before we were done she was reaching for the big story book again, and we read some of it before other distractions caught her attention - she was hungry, the cat needed his breakfast, and there were toys to play with. She had to watch Grandpapa cook. Lots to do here first thing in the morning!

In parting, I should mention that Grandpapa has been practicing with the video camera and we can look forward to lots of interesting footage.

Today was Steve's day out, which isn't really fair because I'm sure I had just as good a day as he did. Cara seemed hungry when she got home, though I learned later that she had had breakfast. We went to the freezer and found waffles. Cara was perfectly happy to take one as-is, and she walked away with her frozen waffle. I offered to toast it for her, but she really didn't care. My dad had told me that he had given her frozen waffles before, but I never really thought she'd eat one!

Jim and Janet came up in the morning to work on the basement, and Cara got to play with her grandma. They read books and played hard with Cara's Playmobil set. When Cara was hungry we all went out to lunch at On the Border. Cara was a good girl; we fed her chips and amused her with toys until the food came. She thought it was very funny when her little car drove on her head. Cara did a great job eating her quesadilla, and I decided there wasn't enough of it left to make it worth bringing it home. Cara's verbal development is progressing, of course. When Grandma needed a tool to get a toy out from under the couch, I handed Cara a set of tongs and told her to bring them to Grandma. She did. On the basement later, Cara was the closest of us to some tools. Grandpa asked Cara to hand him the level. She did. I don't think that any of us really think she knows what a level is; she must have gotten lucky!

Later, my mom came up! We rarely see each other lately, though Cara sees my mom almost every week, so it was nice to spend some time together. The three of us went out to the mall, for no particular reason. We walked right by Tiny Town, which was absolutely mobbed! Cara was tired already, perhaps, because she wanted to be carried a lot. She got down to ride the escalators, though, and for a little bit she walked and we swung her. We took Cara on the carousel! We tried putting her onto a horse, but she just couldn't settle. She wanted a different horse, and then that one wasn't good, either. There were just so many options that she couldn't opt for anything at all and ended up riding in Grandma's arms.

Next, we went to the Playmobil store. Grandma, Mommy, and Cara all had a great time playing with the castle set. Cara walked the unicorns around, inside the castle and outside the castle. Sometimes they ate. Grandma and Mommy put things together and gathered pieces of various types and tried to figure out what they were. Before we left, Grandma bought Cara a little farm set to go with her house and expanding family and menagerie. We haven't opened it yet. On the way home we stopped at Wegman's and picked up Chinese food for dinner.

Cara ate her lo mein while in her booster seat, and when we took the tray off we found plenty of it in her lap. I picked it off and put it on the tray Grandma was holding. Cara helpfully joined in, finding noodles and putting them on the tray, too. We all watched some Winnie the Pooh, and Cara danced along, especially to the Tigger song. I rewind that one and play it twice. The bath was a lot of fun tonight. I used our squirter to get Cara's hair wet, and it did pretty well at rinsing her, too. It's cute; after you dump water on her head, she rushes over and hugs you for comfort. Cara was in no hurry to get out, so we let her play for a long time, driving her little toy car along the rim of the tub and chasing the tub toys grandma tossed her. Grandma got her into her pajamas, I gave her the bottle, we brushed our teeth, and then, after I read to her for a full twenty minutes, Cara went to bed.

10/15/06 (Sunday)

Cara slept a little late this morning, then I got her into her clothes and gave her a nice breakfast of eggs and toast. I gave her toast with butter on it, and she got the butter on her hands, but not too badly. Mommy came home and put Cara in more layers, because she knew that it was chilly out. We had a television-less morning for once, which is good--we don't want to become dependent on it. I opened up the Playmobil farm set that was purchased yesterday and Cara played with that.

It wasn't long before we packed ourselves up and got in the car to go to the Philadelphia Zoo! Cara and her Mommy have been there a couple of times, but I hadn't had the opportunity yet, so it was very nice to have a little family outing there. Cara kept awake for the whole car ride down (I plied her with goldfish crackers when she got noisy), which I thought would be a problem once we arrived at the zoo. But really we had a perfect day. The weather was chilly out of the sun, but it was a nice sunny day and we didn't have to dress as warmly as we thought we would. Cara enthusiastically pointed and laughed at every animal we looked at. I have a theory that she seemed to prefer the animals that were asleep to those that were moving around. I can't think why, but to me it seemed to be the case. There were plenty of animals out and I myself got to see many of them closer up than I ever remember having seen them before, especially the big cats (which, we told Cara, were big kitties). It's very good for Cara to get an idea of what the real animals look like, so that her entire knowledge of zebras and giraffes and such doesn't come from anthropomorphic puppets and toys (not that those things don't have their place).

We had lunch inside but luckily grabbed a table by the window where Cara could look out and point and laugh at the geese and the people riding swan boats. She carefully and expertly shelled her meal of hot dog nuggets, eating the hot dog part but leaving most of the fried nugget shell. She also displayed for us once again her ignorance of the correct use of ketchup. I don't think she ate a single one of her french fries, but would dip them into the ketchup and then suck the ketchup off. Then she would hold the used french fry like a dead rat, and wave it around, looking for a place to put it down.

After lunch we saw lots of other animals, but one of the coolest parts was actually the nearly deserted bird house. Unlike my other experiences in these kinds of places, here all the birds were clearly visible in the habitat we walked through and barely afraid of us at all. Cara pointed at them. We also got to go into the lorikeet enclosure; we couldn't feed them, but we got close enough.

The big attraction and probably Cara's favorite part of the visit was the treehouse. She got to climb around all over and explore; there was a slide which she managed to go down several times, and many larger children which she managed to get in the way of, and of course there was her great friend Mr. Caterpillar. You may remember him from the photos from Cara's last visit to the zoo. He's simply a large scale model of a caterpillar that children can climb on. Cara for some reason has an inordinate fondness for him which, we were shocked to find, had not diminished between this visit and the last. She pet him nicely and climbed onto him with no assistance from us, and then grinned in a wide-mouthed expression of utter ecstasy.

A few animal viewings after the treehouse, it became clear that Cara was getting tired. By the time we finally exited the zoo and were getting ready to cross the street into our parking lot, Cara had a very far-away look in her eyes and looked as if she was barely conscious of what was going on around her. She was, however, still pointing gamely at something or other. We strapped her in the back seat of the car and within fifteen minutes she was out. She awoke near the end of our ride, slugged down some water from her sippy cup, and then appeared to go directly back to sleep.

Cara was back up to full energy when we arrived home, but very hungry. Evelyn and I managed to keep her somewhat busy with some small snacks while Evie was cooking dinner, and I entertained her by showing her photos from our trip to Baltimore. She has a big smile whenever she sees a photo of someone she knows. And she likes looking at photos of the kitties.

For dinner, we punched Cara's booster seat up a notch and actually had her eating at the table, not from the seat's tray. She ate just like a big girl, except that she grabbed huge gobs of spaghetti with her hands and dropped half of it into her lap.

We stepped out in the evening again for a quick trip to an electronics store, where Cara acquired ribbons from two balloons and maniacally pushed around a shopping cart with her mother. Then it was home, bath, and bed. A perfect day!

10/16/06 (Monday)

Cara had her eighteen month checkup this morning, along with two shots. She weighs 25 pounds and she's grown two inches since the last checkup at one year. I was pleased that Cara didn't fall for any of Doctor Chen's distraction tricks. When the time came for the shots, Cara was somewhat calm and barely cried as the very quick and awful poking was done. In all, a very successful visit--but we will have to go back next week for a flu booster shot, darn.

The visit was right at Cara's nap time. So she fell asleep in the car on the way over, then acted cheerful and pleasant to the nurses and doctors that came in; as cheerful as a person can be wearing only a diaper. On the way home, Cara nearly fell asleep again. Once home, I put her in the high chair for Cheerios, a banana, a cheese stick and water. Then I whisked her upstairs. Once in the crib she cried for oh, twelve seconds, and then fell asleep.

I came home and was delighted to hear that Cara is in the 90th percentile for height, though she's only 50th for weight. The poor kid had a short nap today, which may have contributed to her being a little bit cranky in the afternoon. Once we got going, though, she was fine.

Cara and I went down to the high school, which is where Linwood plays their football games. One of the kids on the team had asked me to show up, and I decided that Cara was probably a bigger football fan than I. We both wore hooded sweatshirts with big pockets, and I left my pocketbook in the car. In my pockets I had some pretzels, a sippy cup, two giraffes, and, though I had intended to leave it in the car, a nice, woolly stuffed rabbit. The rabbit really took up an entire pocket, so I ended up putting the giraffes into Cara's pockets. Eventually I showed her where they were and she managed to take one out and put it back. Later on she was picking up leaves and I suggested that she put one in her pocket. She tried, but it didn't work out. I wonder whether she'll remember about pockets tomorrow.

The giraffes came out to play, and one had an adventure. Cara dropped it over the chain-link fence, but it bounced back under to our side. That led me to try an experiment. I am proud to tell you that Cara understands the word "through," a very useful preposition. I asked whether the giraffe could go through the fence, and Cara stepped up and showed me that he could. Someone very nicely rescued him for us afterwards. Cara got to meet many of my colleagues and some former and some current students. I think she liked watching the cheerleaders. Personally, I found the football quite boring. We won, I think.

Back at home, Cara and I went for a walk, and we saw the Running Lady. This is a woman who is almost always running around our neighborhood. Hardly a day goes by in which we don't see her somewhere. She said hi to Cara, who waved. As the lady ran on, I asked Cara whether she could run. She certainly could! She took off after the Running Lady, going the entire length of someone's yard.

Dinner was nice. I don't want to jinx anything, but Cara doesn't seem to feel any need to rub food in her hair. We had spinach pasta, and Cara ate at the table. I put a stick-on plastic placemat at her place, and it helped with cleanup. Cara eats from a plate now, though she does take some of her food off of it and eat from the table. Cara ate plenty of pasta and some fruit snacks, and then I put into effect a plan I had been hatching. After Cara's demonstration of her ketchup skills yesterday and on Saturday with her grandparents, I had a thought. She dips the long object into the thick liquid, then sucks the liquid off and starts over. Isn't that how you eat yogurt with a spoon? I handed her a spoon and let her go wild. That child ate half a container of yogurt by herself! Well, I held the container. I have to qualify my statement further by confessing that she actually spooned half the container out, but she only got about three quarters of that into herself; she wore the rest. It dripped down her face and fell onto and into her shirt. It dribbled onto her pants. It was so bad that I took off her shirt at the table, because I couldn't bring myself to pick her up with it on.

Cara has definitely started to nod and say yes. This evening, for instance, she nodded when I asked whether she wanted me to put her yellow hat on her. This happened in three separate instances, after each of which Cara ran around with her hat on. The other big development is that Cara is working on kissing. She can make the noise, but she can't actually kiss anything yet. Another thing she's doing is a little odd. She put her Playmobil people to bed and says, "p-shhh!" We're not sure what that's all about. Tonight Cara was very creative in her play; she put the Playmobil characters down the Weebles' slide. Upstairs, Daddy and Cara put her toy trucks down the ramps in her dinosaur. All of the toys seemed to have a good time.

We have put away all of our bottles and our bottle-warmer, but Cara still needs calcium. She needs 60-80 of what we need, and she won't drink milk from a sippy cup or even from a grown-up glass. We're going to have to hope her yogurt-eating skills continue to develop!

10/17/06 (Tuesday)

Cara made a cow puppet today at daycare. It's a brown paper lunch bag with a cow head pasted on. There is some fake grass in the mouth. Cara colored the cow, and it's evident that her coloring is actually developing. Her scribbles are definitely going in the direction of the ears. I was very pleased, also, when I asked Cara a question in front of Susan, and she said "yeah." It's always nice to have an outsider witness your child's progress.

Cara and I got home around five today, and we had a good time hanging around the house. Cara played pretty independently, which she is doing more and more these days. Eventually, I got her into the Halloween costume I found for her this afternoon: it's as large on her as the little monster costume was small, but she will probably be a bunny. She'll be a cute, white one, with long whiskers and of course nice pink ears. I also bought her a princess dress, just in case. Together, they cost considerably less than the little monster, and they are returnable.

When it was time for dinner I asked Cara whether she wanted to go over to PJ's house. I told her she had to get her shoes on first, and so she stood at the door, rattling the handle and saying "shoes, shoes, shoes," refusing to let me sit her down. Finally I had to put them on her against her will.

Em made us all chicken parm, which everyone enjoyed, including Cara. We also all enjoyed a chocolate cake. The kids had theirs upstairs and then went downstairs to play, and then we had ours. Poor Ron was sitting on the floor with his, and he was mobbed by toddlers! Cara had gotten Steve's fork, and she went running at Ron and started eating almost before he could notice. It was all over then; PJ quickly joined in. They cleaned his plate.

10/18/06 (Wednesday)

I beat Cara and her grandpapa home today, and the first thing I noticed when Cara walked in was her runny nose. Uh-oh! I jinxed her by thinking just the other day that she hadn't been sick in a long time! She and I mostly just relaxed and snuggled and watched Winnie-the-Pooh until her daddy got home. She hadn't been cranky with Grandpapa, and she wasn't really bad with us, either, but I thought she wasn't quite herself.

On the calcium front, I purchased orange juice and yogurt. Cara drank some orange juice but not enough to fill her quota. She didn't eat much at dinner, so we theorize that her throat may be sore or maybe things don't taste right. We took her temperature after the bath, and it was 99.4, which isn't bad. Fortunately, she still likes her bubble-gum Tylenol.

My project for the day was to go online and print out some pictures for Cara to color. Disney has coloring-book style images that are easy and free to download, and I printed a whole set. We'll have to catch Cara in the right mood for coloring one of these days.

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